November 2011
Views and Opinions

 

Michael Tomasky: GOP Is Set to Self-Destruct Over Payroll Tax
Posted: November 29, 2011
Source: Newsweek's 'The Daily Beast'
Every blessed once in a great while, all artifice is stripped away, rhetoric collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, and we get to see things as they really are. Such will be the case later this week when the Senate tries to vote on extending the payroll-tax holiday. The Republicans will oppose it—that is to say, the Republicans will support a tax increase on working Americans. And why? Because the Democrats want to pay for it with a small surtax on the very top earners. So the choice couldn’t be more direct: which is more important, giving the middle class a tax cut or protecting those who make more than $1 million a year? Republicans are making it clear. This vote alone should destroy them.

The facts: The Social Security payroll tax comes to 12.4 percent of an employee’s salary—employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent. The money goes into the Social Security Trust Fund and finances benefits. At the end of last year, the Obama administration, in exchange for temporarily extending the Bush tax rates on all income levels, got Congress to agree to a one-year 2 percent payroll-tax holiday for employees, down to 4.2 percent. For a $50,000 earner, that meant paying $1,000 a year less in payroll taxes. It was agreed in that law that the holiday would cost the Social Security Trust Fund nothing—the depleted revenue would be replaced out of the general treasury. So the holiday adds to the general deficit but does not affect the trust fund.

The cut proved popular, or is presumed to be popular, so now, as many people predicted last year, Congress wants to extend it. Republicans of course say (as they say of everything) that it hasn’t done any good. But economists attest to its stimulative value. Two economists at the Economic Policy Institute say ending the holiday would reduce GDP by $128 billion and cost 972,000 jobs in 2012. The EPI is a liberal outfit, but Mark Zandi of Moody’s, who advised John McCain in 2008, agrees that raising the payroll tax back to where it was could cause another recession.

And besides those macroeconomic concerns, there is the simple question of money in people’s pockets as they try to tough out the economy. A thousand dollars to a $50,000 earner, or $1,500 to a $75,000 earner, isn’t nothing.

What the Senate Democrats want to do now is this. They want to increase the employee’s reduction from 2 percent to 3.1 percent (that is, to cut it in half from the normal 6.2 percent rate). And they now want, for the first time, to extend the holiday to employers as well. This is important, and it probably won’t be well explained in very many places. But the Democrats would have employers pay 3.1 percent (rather than the 6.2 percent they now pay) on the first $5 million of their payroll. Also, if employers add to their payrolls, they would pay no payroll tax on new hires. So the new bill is specifically aimed at helping the job creators. The total cost is $255 billion.

The Democrats want to pay for it with a 3.5 percent surtax on dollars earned over $1 million per year. In other words, if someone earns $1.3 million a year, she will pay the extra 3.5 percent only on the last $300,000 in earnings; that is, an extra $10,500 a year (bear in mind that this person takes home, after taxes, around $30,000 every two weeks). So it certainly raises the taxes of the very wealthiest. But it gives more money back to middle-class people, and it stimulates the economy, perhaps to the tune of 50,000 jobs a month, maybe even more.
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Governor right to put proposal to hike taxes before voters
Posted: November 29, 2011
Source: The Olympian
Gov. Chris Gregoire is doing the right thing by putting an all-cuts budget before state lawmakers Monday and encouraging them to send a tax-increase referendum to the voters next March in hopes of buying back a selected menu of state programs and services.

Let the voters decide, because there is no realistic chance of getting a tax-increase vote out of the Legislature in the 30-day special session.

When legislators convene in the House and Senate chambers at noon Monday, they face a daunting task. After three years of successive budget reductions, lawmakers are looking at yet another budget deficit – this one set at $1.4 billion.

“I never thought we’d still be doing this – still cutting the fabric of Washington three years after the start of the Great Recession,” Gregoire said in a prepared statement as she released her budget proposal. “Once again, I am presenting an all-cuts supplemental proposal to carve another huge portion from the budget – a budget we’ve already cut by $10.5 billion in the past three years. Our state government is smaller, leaner and, sadly, meaner to Washingtonians who depend on services that the private sector does not provide. This latest proposal includes more devastating cuts to education and public safety, and services for seniors, citizens with developmental disabilities and those with mental illness.”

Gregoire’s spending plan is a nightmare – for K-12 education, for colleges and universities, for social services and a myriad of state programs. When this socially-conscious governor starts suggesting a 5 percent reduction – $693,000 – for the state’s school for the deaf and blind – you know that she is no longer trimming fat from the budget, but is, indeed, down to the bone.

[...] Gregoire is proposing to eliminate the Basic Health Plan – removing the final 35,000 low-income people from the state’s insurance plan. She cuts $7.2 million from welfare grants to low-income families with children, eliminates the disability lifeline medical program for fragile, low-income people and cuts parole services for 400 youthful offenders.

In her $1.7 billion in proposed cuts, the governor proposes the elimination of medical programs for 55,000 low-income residents. In addition, she would end subsidize child-care programs for 4,000 families.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[...] We support the governor’s proposal to let the voters decide whether the severe cuts should go forward or if a tax increase is warranted to restore specific programs.

During their 30-day special session lawmakers should have a robust discussion about the governor’s spending reductions and whether those are the right program and service cuts. They also must decide on a tax to increase and what specific programs and services that tax increase would restore.

Lawmakers must act by Dec. 30, to put the tax referendum before voters on March 19.

This issue, because of the long-term consequences and impact on the lives of the frail and vulnerable, rightfully belongs in the hands of the voters.
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What's Really Behind the Nationwide Raids Against #OWS
Oakland copsPosted: November 28, 2011
Source: Wonkette
For a decade now, the Department of Homeland Security has coordinated the law enforcement efforts of America’s major cities, both through the U.S. Conference of Mayors and through a direct network of the nation’s big city police chiefs. And yet, there was widespread “mainstream media” suspicion when reports surfaced of coordinated national assaults against the economic-justice protests. Why would a public so used to illegal federal wiretapping and constant physical surveillance of U.S. Muslim communities and infiltration of anti-war groups in America be surprised by the fact that federal law enforcement agencies were working to stop nationwide protests against the political/economic regime? Isn’t that their job, to stop their corrupt regime from being toppled?

Naomi Wolf looks into this, for The Guardian, because of course American papers aren’t going to touch this:

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profits is less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

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We Are the 99.9%
Posted: November 25, 2011
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
"We are the 99 percent" is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent's gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite's taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn't look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite's share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of "class warfare!" whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are "job creators" — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.
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How Occupy Wall Street Can Restore Clout of the 99%: Scott Turow
Posted: November 21, 2011
Source: Bloomberg
Now that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been driven from many of their encampments, I have an unusual suggestion for how they should next deploy their considerable energies: work across the nation for a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to regulate the expenditure of private money on elections.

Let me connect the dots. The heart of the protests is a lament about widening income inequality in the U.S., brought about, in part, by a government that seems to favor disproportionately wealthy interests. The Occupiers have focused their outrage on the bailout of banks that reaped huge profits on mortgage-backed securities and are now profitable again, while millions of homeowners have been foreclosed upon or lost their jobs.

The best antidote to this imbalance of income and influence would be to greatly reduce the role of private funding in our elections. Nothing is more empowering to the well-heeled -- corporations, unions, lobbyists, political-action committees, trade associations and bundlers -- than our political leaders’ need to come to them hat in hand for the money to get elected.

Although the event has largely faded from memory, in 1974, in the wake of the national shame over Watergate, Congress established meaningful limits not only on campaign donations but also on the expenditure of private funds in an election. A loose assortment of odd bedfellows, including the Conservative Party Senator James Buckley of New York and the American Civil Liberties Union, protested the laws as a violation of the First Amendment right of free expression.
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Republican Financial Plans
Posted: November 19, 2011
Source: Gail Collins, in The New York Times
Our topic for today is: Where do the Republican candidates for president get their money?

The personal finances of the G.O.P. presidential hopefuls are important for two reasons. One is that we’re talking about people who aspire to the most prestigious and important job the nation has to offer. The other is that these folks seem to have done really, really well. Perhaps, they can offer career tips.

Remember when Newt Gingrich claimed that the mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 for his advice “as a historian?” Thousands of young history majors who were resigned to a future in which they would pad out their $2,000-a-semester salaries as part-time adjunct lecturers with fulfilling careers in bartending suddenly were engulfed with new hope.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Newt’s income actually comes from running think tanks that help promote the corporate clients’ goals in the public sector. That may be a little harder for the youth of America to put their heads around. But, kids, if anybody asks you what you want to be when you grow up, say: policy guru.

Gingrich wants everyone to understand that he does not lobby. Really, whatever the exact legal definition of lobbying is, that is something he did not do. The Gingrich Group got what turns out to be about $1.6 million to not-lobby for Freddie Mac, one of a long, long list of clients. Let’s all pause to recall the high dudgeon with which Gingrich announced, during one of the debates, that Representative Barney Frank ought to be put in jail for being “close to” Freddie Mac lobbyists. What kind of politician demands that an elected official be incarcerated for hanging out with the same people who are paying said politician $1.6 million or so to not-lobby?

This is an unusually delusional presidential field. Mitt Romney’s greatest political asset is that he doesn’t seem to actually believe it when he says he’s been consistent on matters like health care reform or abortion. Thank God there’s at least one guy on the stage who knows he’s fibbing.
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Labor law for the 1%
Posted: November 17, 2011
Source: The Hills Congress Blog
Starting in early 2011, the GOP has launched an all-out attack on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) the likes of which has not been seen in six decades.

In the latest development, Hill Republicans are promoting a bill — the ludicrously misnamed Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act (WDFA) — that would further undermine the weak labor rights that still exist in the United States. The bill is neither democratic nor fair but tells us much about the extreme policies of Congressional Republicans on labor rights.

The WDFA is the culmination of several months of sustained GOP attacks on the NLRB. Since June, Republican proposals have included the following: slashing the agency’s funding, preventing new appointments when it is reduced to two members (out of five) at the end of the year, subpoenaing all documents related to the controversial Boeing complaint and interviewing career NLRB employees about the case, undoing a NLRB decision allowing “micro bargaining units” and another on voluntary recognition agreements between employers and unions, diminishing its already weak remedial powers to combat illegal relocations and outsourcing, reversing a new rule on notice posting to inform employees of their workplace rights, blocking a proposed new rule to streamline the current antiquated union certification process — Republicans believe in streamlining the voting period for presidential elections but not for union elections -— and, most boldly, abolishing the agency and dividing its powers between the Labor and Justice Departments.

Hill Republicans have exploited congressional committees to do the bidding of Boeing, the Chamber of Commerce and various far-right groups hostile to labor rights, repeatedly holding vapid hearings on the NLRB’s alleged misdeeds.  Republican Presidential hopefuls have pilloried the agency (pro-union “stooges,” says Mitt Romney) and the GOP has gone “all guns blazing,” as Senator Lindsay Graham threatened it would if the NLRB issued the Boeing complaint, to construct a misleading narrative of an out of control “rogue agency” intent on pursuing a radical pro-union, “job-destroying” regulatory agenda.

Perhaps the most telling incident has been the hysterical reaction on part of Congressional Republicans and employer organizations to the NLRB proposal to inform employees of their rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Most labor and employment statues require that employers post a notice telling employees of their rights. The NLRA is an exception, so in September 2011, the NLRB proposed a rule requiring employers to display a notice outlining employees’ rights under the law. But Republicans and the Chamber have attacked this simple notice posting requirement – which would be considered uncontroversial in every other developed democracy on the planet – as beyond the pale. Workers “can easily get” information from phone calls to the NLRB or from its website.

There is no doubt that the current NLRB has made changes — some minor, some more significant — to the decisions of the Bush NLRB, but this is what always happens with a new administration. Republican have apparently forgotten that in one month in 2007, the Bush NLRB issued an astounding 61 decisions labeled the “September Massacre,” all of them hostile to unions and collective bargaining. Several actions of the current NLRB simply undo the most controversial of these Bush-era NLRB decisions. The only thing that is unusual here is Republicans’ almost hysterical response to these revisions. In part, this over-reaction can be attributed to campaign craziness —it is merely coincidence that South Carolina, home of one of the first Republican primaries, is ground-zero in the Boeing dispute — but it also indicates how far to the right the GOP has moved on labor rights.
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Sen. Harkin: Republican attacks on workers' rights won't create jobs
Posted: November 16, 2011
Source: Senator Tom Harkin, in The Hill
With working families struggling to make ends meet and Americans taking to the streets to protest the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, it is long past time for Congress to start coming up with real solutions that will create jobs and rebuild a strong American middle class. Unfortunately, it seems that congressional Republicans are still more interested in playing political games than coming up with solutions. Instead of joining with Democrats to work on job-creation proposals that Americans overwhelmingly support, Republicans are trying to convince Americans that the National Labor Relations Board — a small federal agency charged with defending workers' rights — is somehow responsible for our nation's economic woes.

The time and attention that House Republicans have devoted to their attack campaign against the NLRB is nothing short of astonishing. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has held no fewer than five hearings this year specifically addressing the NLRB, but has not held a single hearing addressing any specific proposal to create jobs. The House refuses to take up the president's jobs bill but is moving quickly ahead with legislation that would undermine the mission of the board — passing a bill that would make it easier for employers to retaliate against workers and moving a second bill that makes it harder for workers who want a union to hold an election and join one.

Republican elected officials have gone after this small federal agency guns a-blazing — attacking its funding, refusing to confirm nominees, threatening the professional credentials and livelihoods of nonpartisan career employees, and even taking the unprecedented step of calling on Republican Board Member Brian Hayes to abandon the duties he swore to uphold and resign in a blatant political move to incapacitate the agency altogether. As the chairman of the Senate committee with oversight jurisdiction over the National Labor Relations Board and the subcommittee that considers its funding, I have great respect for the National Labor Relations Board and the important work that it does. In this difficult economy it is more important than ever to ensure that workers' legal rights are protected and that working families have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives and their livelihoods, a principle that voters in Ohio resoundingly reaffirmed last week.
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Did Bloomberg do Occupy Wall Street a favor?
Posted: November 15, 2011
Source: Ezra Klein, in The Washington Post
At about 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, hundreds of New York City police officers raided Zuccotti Park. Police tore down tents and, according to witnesses, used tear gas, pepper spray, and at about 3 a.m., a sound cannon. Some of the protesters left immediately, quietly. Some of them joined together in the middle of the park, chanting, “Whose park? Our park!”

Police ultimately made 70 arrests and cleared the area. Their park.

In a statement released a few hours ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg* explained the raid. “I have become increasingly concerned – as had the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties – that the occupation was coming to pose a health and fire safety hazard to the protestors and to the surrounding community. We have been in constant contact with Brookfield and yesterday they requested that the City assist it in enforcing the no sleeping and camping rules in the park. But make no mistake – the final decision to act was mine.”

Members of Occupy Wall Street are furious. Protests are being planned at various sites throughout the day. But the truth is, Bloomberg might have just done Occupy Wall Street a favor.

Next week, temperatures are projected to dip down to the high 30s. Next month, they’re projected to dip into the mid-20s. The month after that, as anyone who has experienced a New York winter know, they’re going to fall even lower.

The occupation of Zuccotti Park was always going to have a tough time enduring for much longer. As the initial excitement wore off and the cold crept in, only the diehards -- and those with no place else to go -- were likely to remain. The numbers in Zuccotti Park would thin, and so too would the media coverage. And in the event someone died of hypothermia, or there was some other disaster, that coverage could turn. What once looked like a powerful protest could come to be seen as a dangerous frivolity.

In aggressively clearing them from the park, Bloomberg spared them that fate. Zuccotti Park wasn’t emptied by weather, or the insufficient commitment of protesters. It was cleared by pepper spray and tear gas. It was cleared by police and authority. It was cleared by a billionaire mayor from Wall Street and a request by one of America’s largest commercial real estate developers. It was cleared, in other words, in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.
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Unions win, Personhood loses: what does it mean?
Protest everything Posted November 13, 2011
Source: The Washington Times
Ohio and Mississippi sent a message to the Right Wing and the Tea Party: “We’re mad as Hell and we're not going to take it anymore.”

The Occupy Wall Street and its other thousand plus protests across the country have spurred Americans to turn their anger and discontent into action, taking that passion to the ballot box. And last night, November 8, two disparate states rejected the extremists who have tried to hijack the government.

In Ohio, the people repealed a Republican-sponsored law (SB 5) that would have limited collective bargaining for public sector unions. Labor unions turned up the heat, but it was the Ohio voters that cooked Republican Governor John Kasich’s goose. He had touted it as his administration’s biggest achievement, initially warning people that they needed to "get on the bus or get run over by the bus." 

Now it appears that it’s the GOP that was flattened by the bus as Americans turned out in droves to repeal the law or Issue 2 as it was called on the ballot. As of this morning, with about 75 percent of the precincts reporting, according to the Associate Press, the law was repealed by a whopping 62 to 38 percent margin. That’s a trouncing by anyone’s measurement.

Down in Mississippi, voters were equally unhappy by abortion rights foes who tried to make a fertilized egg a full-fledge person and citizen with all the attendant rights. Voters knew better and rejected the anti-abortion Personhood Amendment.

Despite being a strong anti-abortion state, Mississippians were concerned with the ramifications of such an extreme measure and with more than half the precincts reporting as of this morning, according to AP, the  amendment is failing 59 percent to 41 percent.  The amendment is considered defeated.

What’s the lesson here for the rest of America? Extremism has no place in American politics. Even though the Republicans and their henchmen and women (the Tea Party, Koch brothers, Freedom Express, and American Enterprise, to name just four of their cohorts), think America wants to bend the arm of history far Right and unravel all the rights and protections Americans have claimed as theirs over the last hundred years, they are dead wrong.
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Oligarchy Sorry, GOP, But It Looks Like America's Bullsh*t Detector Just Went Off
Posted November 10, 2011
Source: Crooks and Liars
It's great when we can disagree in a civilized way, but it's getting pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the phrase "right-wing logic," as delivered by the GOP and mimicked by Mitt Romney, has become the mother of all oxymorons. They tell us corporations are people. But people? Not so much. That Right used that argument that in yesterday's elections, but it's starting to look like voters in swing states and the heart of Red America have had enough.

They love to preach the "corporate personhood" principle. IBM, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton: They're people! Why, they can even "speak"! Sure, they may be limited to the crude vocabulary of millions and billions, but you gotta admit: Come election time, they're fluent in it.

These corporations are endowed with freedom of speech, say Mitt and Friends, but employees of the same corporations aren't - especially when that speech involves forming a union. Follow the logic and the conclusion is inescapable: the Right believes that the company is a person but the people who work for it aren't.

Got that?

We're told that corporations have privacy rights, too. They have so much right to privacy, in fact, that when they throw millions of dollars of "speech" into an election we're not allowed to know who's speaking! But the Right says people with jobs don't have privacy rights. Employers can spy on them, say conservatives, even when they're at home using Facebook or Twitter

That anti-human, pro-corporate definition of personhood is part of what Ohio voters soundly rejected yesterday when they overturned the laws passed by its Republican Governor and legislators, who forbid union activities on the part of state employees. In a radical redefinition of the personhood principle,these voters decided that teachers and administrators and other state workers are actually ... people. And as people, they have the right to organize and bargain for themselves.
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Back to Common Sense at the Polls
Posted: November 10, 2011
Source: The New York Times, editorial
It might have been “too much too soon,” a chastened Gov. John Kasich of Ohio admitted on Tuesday night, after his state’s voters overwhelmingly rejected his attempt to break public employee unions. He certainly was right about “too much,” an analysis that also applies to other examples of Republican overreach around the country that were kicked into the gutter: an anti-abortion amendment in Mississippi, a voting restriction in Maine, the radical anti-immigrant agenda of a politician in Arizona.

These policies, and similar ones in other states, were passed in an arrogant frenzy by a Tea Party-tide of Republicans elected in 2010. Many of them decided that they had a mandate to dismantle some of the basic protections and restrictions of government. They went too far, and weary voters had to drag them back toward the center.

As a result, Tuesday brought an overdue return of common sense to government policy in many states. Many voters are tired of legislation driven more by ideology than practicality, of measures that impoverish the middle class or deprive people of basic rights in order to prove some discredited economic theory or cultural belief.

That was most evident in Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly repealed a law pushed through last spring by Republicans to shred collective-bargaining rights for public employees. It prohibited bargaining on health benefits for state and local workers, including teachers, police officers and firefighters, and made it much harder to collect union dues or negotiate on staffing.

Many states are bleeding because of high salaries and lavish benefits, but, as New York and Connecticut have shown, it is possible to reduce them without breaking unions. The roughshod course chosen by Ohio, as well as Wisconsin and Indiana, made the real agenda all too clear: breaking the political power of public unions. Blue-collar voters in Ohio, many of whom got to the middle class through collective bargaining, understood the game.
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Our tax dollars shouldn’t subsidize big corporate profits
Posted: November 9, 2011
Source: John Burbank, in The Stand
What would you think if you could just drive over to your local Apple Store and when you walked in, they handed you a new iPad. For free. You wouldn’t believe it. That’s because you know that in a market economy like ours, you have to pay for a lot of the things you desire.

But what happens when you drive over Stevens Pass just after the first snow storm? You are only able to do so because it has been cleared by a state snowplow crew. They don’t stop you and charge you for that service. You pay your taxes, and having the roads cleared is part of government.

How about when your child starts kindergarten and advances up through elementary school, learning to read, write, add, subtract, multiply, make statistical calculations, study basic science, and think? Is there a monitor at the school door, turning away kids who haven’t bought their daily tickets? Nope. Educating children is part of what we collectively pay for with our taxes.

What if you are a business like Boeing, anxious to bring in the next generation of workers as the baby boomers retire? The community colleges, like Edmonds, are training workers for aerospace. The University of Washington graduates a pool of engineers from which you can pick and choose. State Route 526 provides part of the transportation infrastructure to get workers and airplane components to Paine Field. All those things are paid for with taxpayer dollars.

So you might think that Boeing pays an appropriate amount of taxes for the things from which it benefits, like K-12 education, community colleges, highways, and the state patrol – but sadly, you’d be mistaken. Boeing bullied the state legislature into a $3.2 billion tax rebate package instead, which might be okay, if Boeing actually made the new 787 in Washington. Instead, they have contracted out production all over the world. And now they are building a new 787 site in South Carolina. So our tax give-away has worked out pretty well for them… but not for us!

Of course, Boeing is a big company. Perhaps it pays more than its share of federal taxes? Nope. From 2008 through 2010, Boeing didn’t pay federal taxes. They figured out how to legally get money from the federal government as a tax rebate – so much, that their tax rate was negative 1.8 percent. On a three year profit of almost $10 billion, Boeing actually received $177.6 million from the federal government. And not in exchange for making planes, either; it was just money from the taxpayers delivered to Boeing’s Chicago headquarters.
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How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
Posted: November 9, 2011
Source: Rolling Stone
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."
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The real reasons Americans distrust government
Posted: November 8, 2011
Source: Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post
Whenever a poll comes out finding that distrust of government is soaring, it tends to be taken as proof that the conservative narrative is carrying the day. But the problem with such polls is that they don’t tell us why distrust of government is on the rise — and some of the reasons for it might actually support the liberal narrative, not the conservative one.

For instance: What if distrust of government is running so high partly because Congress is failing to pass job creation policies, including tax increases on the rich, that have broad public support, and has prioritized the deficit for months when Americans want the top priority to be unemployment? If so, it’s hard to see how this supports the conservative storyline.

National Journal has now released a fascinating new poll that sheds new light on this possibility: It finds solid support for Democratic ideas on the economy but also high public pessimism that those ideas will be implemented. Solid majorities want Congress to pass new federal spending on infrastructure and schools; deficit reduction through a combination of tax increases on the rich and spending cuts; and new legislation to make mortgage refinancing easier. By contrast, only minorities favor deficit reduction with just cuts to federal programs, including entitlements.

But here’s the real rub. Only 27 percent think infrastructure spending will ... actually happen. Only 37 percent think deficit reduction through spending cuts and tax hikes will ... actually happen. Only 39 percent think legislation to make mortage refinancing easier will ... actually happen.

The problem here is an age-old one: When people are asked about generalities — do you favor spending cuts, do you think government can create jobs, do you think the deficit is a big problem — they tend to endorse the conservative economic worldview. But when people are asked about specific spending cuts, they recoil, and when people are asked about specific Democratic policy ideas, they support them. And yet, people look at Congress and see it failing to pass the economic policies they want — even as Congress is mulling cuts to popular programs. Could the failure to act on national priorities have something to do with rising distrust of government?
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Cuts to '99 percent' hurt small businesses
Posted: November 7, 2011
Source: The Columbian
From Washington, D.C., to Olympia, budget cuts seem to be the talk of the town. Following $10 billion of state budget cuts to education and health care since the recession began, last month Gov. Chris Gregoire previewed how damaging it would be to the state to continue the course of all-cuts budgeting.

Eliminate the Basic Health Plan. Lay off teachers and increase class sizes.

At the same time, on the other side of the country, news outlets leaked new proposals being considered by the super-secret Congressional supercommittee that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

In both cases, elected leaders have been too timid about demanding an end to tax breaks and preferential rates that benefit Wall Street banks, large corporations, and millionaire CEOs.

It's no wonder that Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement has sprung up around the country and at home here in Vancouver. "We are the 99 percent" is an anthem that strikes a chord far beyond those who march in the streets and occupy public spaces.

Under the radar, there is a growing split in the business community between corporate elites fighting to maintain their special-interest tax breaks, and small business owners who say it's time for big business to share in the sacrifice to fix the economy.

For small business owners, it’s not about beating up on our big business competitors. And, though we care deeply about the communities in which we do business, our views are not derived simply from compassion for the most vulnerable.

Plainly put, small businesses will suffer if deficit reduction is achieved through further rounds of deep budget cuts to basic services that support middle-class and poor people.

Why? Because that’s our customer base, and what small businesses need the most right now is more customers.
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The Next Fight Over Jobs
Posted: November 6, 2011
Source: The New York Times, editorial
America Wants to WorkThe way the job market is going, it will never be robust enough to bring down the unemployment rate, now at 9 percent, or 13.9 million people. Monthly job growth has slowed to an average of just 90,000 new jobs a month over the past six months, a pace at which growth in the working-age population will always exceed the number of new jobs being created.

High unemployment and low job growth, which have plagued the economy all through the current "recovery," hurt both consumer spending and economic growth. But don't count on government to do the obvious and urgent thing — intervene to create jobs.

Tragically, the more entrenched the jobs shortage becomes, the more paralyzed Congress becomes, with Republicans committed to doing nothing in the hopes that the faltering economy will cost President Obama his job in 2012. Last week, for instance, Senate Republicans filibustered a $60 billion proposal by Mr. Obama to create jobs by repairing and upgrading the nation's deteriorating infrastructure. They were outraged that the bill would have been paid for by a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million.

Things may be about to get worse.

Federal unemployment benefits, which generally kick in after 26 weeks of state-provided benefits, are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. That would be a disaster for many of the estimated 3.5 million Americans who get by on extended benefits — an average of $295 a week. It would also be a blow to the economy, because it would reduce consumer spending by about $50 billion in 2012 — which would mean slower economic growth and 275,000 lost jobs. Unfortunately, given Republicans’ demonstrated willingness to ignore human needs and economic logic, it is more likely than not that jobless benefits will be a major battle in the months ahead.
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Oligarchy, American Style
Posted: November 3, 2011
Source: Paul Krugman, in The New York Times
Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators! Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.
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Elizabeth Warren's anger
Posted: November 3, 2011
Source: Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post

There’s a lot of chatter today about this video of an unemployed man and Tea Party heckler calling Elizabeth Warren a “socialist whore” at a campaign event, all because she embraced Occupy Wall Street. But the really interesting thing here is what she took away from the episode, after spending some time thinking about it:

After the event, Warren reflected on the man’s outburst, which she said was her first such encounter. “I actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did. He’s been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names,” she told HuffPost.

The assault stuck with Warren, and she continued to think about it throughout the night. Hours later, she said she wasn’t upset with the man himself, but rather with those who attempt to channel his anger in a malevolent direction.

“I was thinking more about the heckler. I’m not angry with him, but he didn’t come up with the idea that his biggest problem was Occupy Wall Street. There’s someone else pre-packaging that poison — and that’s who makes me angry,” she said.

This is someone who really grasps the larger political, economic, and historical context within which this is all unfolding. Wall Street excess nearly destroyed our economy, and helped land us in a financial crisis that’s inflicting suffering on millions of Americans. For all of the protesters’ excesses, the sentiments underlying Occupy Wall Street — anger at the lack of accountability for the crisis, profound concern about rising inequality and the doubts it casts on our future — are thoroughly mainstream in nature. Similarly, Elizabeth Warren’s case for raising taxes on the very wealthy — that they got rich in part because of a functioning society that enabled it, and that they can afford to chip in a bit more to keep that functioning society afloat — is also a perfectly appropriate and not at all radical response to rising inequality and our serious fiscal plight.

The conservative response to this critique has been remarkable to behold. Figures on the right have transparently used Occupy Wall Street’s theatrics to distract from its message, in an effort to play on the cultural instincts of struggling blue collar whites and turn them against the economic populism embodied by the protests and Warren’s candidacy. They’ve screamed “class warfare” and “socialism” at even the most modest of proposals designed to reverse trends that have badly exacerbated inequality for decades, with untold consequences for the future. They’ve tried in every every which way to push the cultural buttons of voters who are responding favorably to the political conversation’s increased focus on inequality, economic unfairness, and what we should do about them. They have hauled out the old cultural playbook that’s been in use since the late 1960s, in an all out effort to persuade working class and moderate voters to oppose any and all efforts to impose a modicum of accountability or to reform the indefensible status quo.

I don’t know if those tactics will work or not, or what motivated that heckler to call Warren a “socialist whore.” But I can see why she labeled the larger atmosphere “poison,” and why she’s so angry about it. Indeed, you couldn’t ask for a moment that more perfectly captures the pathologies of this political moment, and how high the stakes have become.
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Senators who oppose infrastructure spending are putting the rich’s interests first
Posted: November 2, 2011
Source: Greg Sargent, in
When the Senate votes later this week on Obama’s plan for new infrastructure spending to create jobs, Democratic aides expect that not a single Republican Senator will vote for it — because it’s paid for by a 0.7 percent surtax on income over $1,000,000 that would impact a tiny minority of Americans.

Dem aides say they also expect a handful of Dem defections when the Rebuild America Jobs Act — whose goal is to create hundreds of thousands of jobs — is voted on this week. Senator Ben Nelson’s spokesman says he’s undecided, as are Mark Pryor and Jon Tester. But Dems expect to be able to make the case after the vote that the GOP caucus unanimously opposed an idea many Republicans have previously supported — simply because it’s paid for by slightly higher taxes on the ultra wealthy.

Indeed, a number of GOP Senators in the past have explicitly endorsed infrastructure spending — in different contexts — as a good way to spur economic growth or maintain economic competitiveness:

A spokesperson for Lugar, Andy Fisher, tells me he will vote against the infrastructure bill this week, because he opposes “raising taxes to invest in infrastructure.” I’m waiting on other responses.

In fairness to these Senators, all these quotes came in different contexts from the battle over Obama’s proposal. But the point here is that all these Senators agree that in a general sense, infrastructure spending is important or even critical to help the economy and the country. They won’t support it in this case, however, because it would entail a tiny surtax on millionaires. This is the dealbreaker — and if a few moderate Dems join them, they, too, will be putting the interests of a tiny minority of Americans before the interests of the rest of us.
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Companies enjoying tax breaks should 'give three' percent back
Posted: November 1, 2011
Source: Danny Westneat, in The Seattle Times
The state workers' union meant to be combative. But last week, in throwing down the political equivalent of a schoolyard taunt, I think they hit on an idea with legs.

The backdrop was our grim-reaper governor, once again at the mike to say she must throw poor people off health insurance, jam the public-school classrooms with 30-plus kids in each and gut the universities.

I have no choice, she kept saying. My pocketbook is empty.

Both Democrats and Republicans nodded gravely and then dipped into their stock of times-are-tough clichés. We've looked under every rock. It's all on the table. Nobody is spared the pain.

Bull, said the union.

Specifically what the union said was: You're asking us for another 3 percent cut in health benefits. How about convening a meeting of corporations to ask them to give up 3 percent of their tax breaks?

As I said, I don't think the union meant this literally. But it strikes me as a fantastic idea. Give three. That's not much, right?

It turns out it could add up.
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